The Controversy of Zion, Part 2–The Jealousy of its Origin

In the 1920’s, 30’s, and 40’s, the world was jealous over the region of Israel. Abdel Rahman Azzam, first secretary-general of the Arab League, once told a British reporter about his plans for parceling up Palestine under the British Mandate. Specifically, Egypt would get the Negev, Transjordan (modern day Jordan) would take the hill country, Galilee would go to Syria except for a swath along the coast which would belong to Lebanon. In other words, there would be no autonomous, sovereign state of Palestine. What is today the nation state of Israel would simply be divvied up and occupied by neighboring Muslim countries. Arabs in the 1930s even rejected the idea of a Palestinian state, saying that the region belonged to the whole Arab and Muslim world. The main concern was maintaining Islamic supremacy in the Middle East, not creating a “free” Palestine.

The world was jealous of any possibility of Jewish presence in the land then, and the violent, hateful saga continues today. It seems we are all either Esau or Jacob. When it comes to the controversy of Zion, jealousy and deception are twins at the heart of the conflict, out-manuvering each other to one-up the other, leaving both parties estranged and fractured outside of Eden.

The nations of the Middle East may claim to want a Palestinian state, but greed runs high. There is little interested in making life better for Gazan children or innocents in the West Bank. Hamas’ war crimes and inhumane combat strategies make that much abundantly clear. Instead it’s a plot to take Jewish land, reclaim it for Islam, and send Israelis running for their lives. There is a jealousy and envy over Zion, the city of Jerusalem, and the people who live in it. In the West, support for Palestine runs from the same jealous core. In order to preserve peace, power, economies, alliances, and trade, a growing number of western nations are pushing for what has become known as a “two-state solution.” While the West may not want Israel’s land for itself, the idea is to take it from the Israeli people because if Western powerhouses can just get Israel out of the way, they can get what they want. It’s jealousy, all wrapped up in the prettiest, most politically-correct, ethically-superior wrapping paper money can buy.

While I could unpack the historical and political implications of the origins of this conflict, I won’t. Instead, I believe there is a far more detrimental side to this controversy that hits much closer to home for western Christians. The topic of Israel is controversial theologically, and it’s a pressing obstacle because it informs how we view and engage with the people caught up in the conflict going on in the holy land today.

The controversy of Zion divides Christians (and even those from other faiths) into different camps. I have taken backlash from believers over my own views on the issue. Sadly, many Christians whom I am friendly with will not even entertain reading this perspective because they have already made up their minds regarding church doctrine around Israel, often alienating the Jewish people, slotting them into a spot to serve some theological end. In my opinion, this is one of the most grievous things happening in Christianity today. I believe the heart of God is crushed over the behavior and ignorance of believers in this area, but that He has a plan to heal the rift and restore us to right relationship with His chosen people and to Himself.

We needn’t look far to identify the root of the theological controversy of Zion because the origin is the same as what fuels the political, territorial, ethical, and religious contempt running rampant in the world today.

The origin of the controversy of Zion is God’s election of and ongoing commitment to the family of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Judah and the bloodline of David through Jesus, the Messiah.

I imagine many people reading this just stopped and squirmed right there. The concept of “election” means lots of different things to lots of different people. Mostly commonly, I hear it used in defense for certain tenants Calvinism that have to do with the salvation and eternal destiny of individuals. That’s a conversation for another day, and its debates have little bearing on this post. Biblical election, however, is a very important concept to understand if we want to have a solid grasp on the controversy of Zion.

Biblical election is God’s choosing of one out of the many, in order through that one, He can restore blessing to the many. God chose (or elected) the family of Abraham (i.e. Israel, the Jews) in order to accomplish this. He has attached His name, reputation, and work in the world to them, and made certain promises to them which include land, among other things. Because Jesus Messiah represents and embodies God’s covenant people, those outside of this family who place their faith and trust in Him join the eternally chosen (elected) family of God. The divine blessing celebrated in Ephesians 1:3-14 is the inclusion of the nations into the messianic Israel, one of many scriptures which celebrate this! For the apostles and New Testament authors, God’s salvation of Israel and its flow out to all the nations is the essence of the Good News.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.

Romans 1:16

When we read phrases like “first to the Jew, then to the Gentile…” or “salvation is from the Jews,” it’s easy to see how biblical election continues the theme of Israel-centric thinking. God will bring about His purposes to bless all nations through blessing and saving His chosen, elect people (the Jews) led by their Messiah (Jesus). We know the Bible clearly teaches God will restore Israel, bless them, and establish an everlasting kingdom from Jerusalem. (I don’t want to proof text this entire blog post. However, if you’re curious about idea, I recommend starting by reading the Abraham story in Gen. 12-24, and then go read any (or all!) of the prophets on a face value reading, looking for God’s promises to Israel. It will be impossible to miss.)

The problem, of course, is that by-and-large Judaism rejects Jesus as Messiah and modern Israel is a very secular nation. So the question becomes how will the Jewish people rule with Jesus in Jerusalem as God clearly promises throughout the Bible? Did we read that wrong? Does “Israel” really mean something else? Did Jesus’ work on the cross accomplish all that already? Or is there some other way we are meant to understand God’s promises?

In his fantastic book When a Jew Rules the World, author Joel Richardson (pp. 28-29) concisely lays out a couple options to deal with these questions:

• Option 1: God simply failed to keep his promises.
• Option 2: God never meant to literally fulfill his promises. They are always meant to be understood as “spiritual” promises as blessings for those “in Christ,” the true, spiritual Israel (i.e. the Christian Church). [This is a form of replacement theology that is widely accepted within nearly all traditions of Christianity.]
• Option 3: God’s promise to the family of Abraham will never be fulfilled literally according to the specifications given by the Lord, but will instead be fulfilled “in heaven” or in some heavenly “New Earth” that has no direct correlation to the present earth or any regions specified within the actual covenant. [Also a form of replacement theology.]
• Option 4: While the Lord has not yet fulfilled all His promises to Israel literally, He remains committed to doing so in the future when He returns.

Depending on what stance you take to deal with the covenantal commitments God made to Abraham and his descendants, you’ll probably land somewhere within the spectrum of these four main views. I find the fourth and final bullet point most compelling, but many believers have taken different paths to answer this question.

But without further evidence or debate, I could stop this piece right here, having made the argument that the controversy of Zion is theological. Notice how simply bringing up the topic of Israel raises deep, wide, and long-standing debates over what God said? God’s covenant with Abraham, it’s extension at Sinai with Israel, His promises to David, and the new covenant for Israel made in Jesus’ own blood–it’s all highly controversial!

Entire systems of theology have been laboriously crafted and painstakingly written out in tomes, all in the hopes of neatly resolving the controversy on our own terms. We give them names such as covenant theology, fulfillment theology, dispensationalism, supercessionism, inclusion theology, and the like. They are masterfully conceived and all true to a certain degree, but these expressions usually have two things in common: 1) a low view of Israel, the Torah, the temple, and the Jewish people, and 2) a bias toward replacing God’s people with something else.

Replacement theology (which goes by many names) assumes that Christians have replaced the Jewish people, the Church has replaced the temple, grace has replaced the Torah, and either the Church (or sometimes Christ Himself) has replaced Israel. Any belief that strips Israel of its ongoing, corporate calling and election, or which rejects the notion of a future restoration of a Jewish kingdom, is, in essence, ideological theft. It steals God’s blessing from Israel and the Jewish people, either rendering it void or assigning it to someone entirely. Unfortunately, Christians innocently believe this kind of thing all the time; most of them just don’t realize it.

The hard truth of biblical election is that it means God both chose and also didn’t choose someone to bring His blessing to the world. He chose the nation of Israel and the Jewish people, led by His Messiah. Of course, if you recognize the Jewish Messiah as the true, rightful King of the cosmos, you too are grafted into the chosen line. You become adopted, brought near, and included in the covenant family. This is the core of the gospel, and has been since page 12 of the Bible: through the Messiah of Israel, all the people of the land will be blessed.

As soon as I say these kinds of words, Christians light up. We love hearing that because we have faith in Jesus, the promises of God belong to us. The scriptures are full of passages about the nations taking part in God’s redemptive plans, so rejoicing is a healthy response. But I have also noticed an undercurrent of possession, a sense of superiority or rank associated with Christian faith in Jesus. For a long time, I had a hard time hearing that the tremendous gifts, blessings, and future hope which have turned my life around do not actually belong to me. They belong first and irrevocably to the Jewish people.

They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises. To them belong the patriarchs, and from their race…is the Messiah, who is God over all, blessed forever. Amen.

Romans 9:4-5

As regards the gospel, [the Jewish people] are enemies for your sake. But as regards election, they are beloved for the sake of their forefathers. For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

Romans 11:28-29

So few Christians have been prepared to hear the Good News behind these words. As I wrote about in a previous post, Christians have mostly been taught we are at the center of the story about us and God, and that the way to God is forgiveness in Jesus. While there is certainly truth to this message and I am incredibly grateful for that truth in my own life, there is also a great deal of misunderstanding and conceit laying under the surface.

The controversy of Zion has infiltrated Christianity to such a degree that many people who claim to love God and follow the teachings of Jesus have never once considered the fact that He was and still is Jewish. So many believers are so far removed from the fact that they follow a Jewish rabbi named Jesus of Nazareth that can’t even get out of their own way long enough to consider that perhaps the thing God said about His election of Israel and the Jewish people is simply what He meant. That something rightfully belongs to those people. And that if we simply believe that God chose Israel, and not Christians, there is still blessing for us too.

As the nations rage today about Israeli possession of the land, I have noticed a dangerous jealousy mirrored in Christianity at large. Like the Esau and the nations, we’re jealous of who God chose and the perks that come with that status. And so, like Jacob and the West, we find other ways to make ourselves feel better and get the thing we want. We value our role as the non-chosen line so little that we’re willing to sell our souls for the bloody stew of replacement theology. We covet God’s blessing of Israel so bad, we’ll claim what belongs to them all day long as our own. We explain away the pages and pages of text in our own Bibles that very clearly outline God’s purposes for Israel and how the nations can get in on the blessings God plans to bestow upon His beloved. We get jumpy when someone says God will have compassion on Israel, restore them to their homeland, rule from Jerusalem, or depict His coming kingdom as inherently Jewish. Despite what Micah 7:18 says, we don’t like the idea that God could “pass over” a people who have rejected Him, often forgetting that we once rejected Him too.

Oh how far we have fallen, we who have said “We will ascend. There is no distinction. We’re all Israel now.” We who have tolerated the teachings of Jezebel and Baalam, who have not grieved over the ruin of Joseph, abandoning the root of our faith to rot in the pit we have cast him into. How quickly we sound like Cain, saying to God when He inquires of us, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Or Esau in crisis, lamenting, “Isn’t there blessing for me too?” Or Ishmael who laughed at beloved, chosen son. Or the older brother in the prodigal son story, who sees the fanfare of his brother’s homecoming as a slap in the face to his many years of familial loyalty. Yet we forget the words of the father:

‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.

Luke 15: 32

Oh dear God, forgive us in our blindness. Forgive us for our conceit, for the jealousy we have built so much of our faith upon, the apathy we have accepted at a substitute for wisdom, and for the envy we may have harbored without knowing. Have mercy and compassion upon us, and help us cultivate a love for Your people and Your land. In an effort to make ourselves feel better, we have accepted theologies that divest the land of Israel and the Jewish people of Your purposes for them, and in doing so, we have divested our own hearts from Your purposes for us.

However, God, You do not wish for us to remain there. You do not want us to be jealous of our Jewish brothers; You want us to be jealous for them. Lord, as all eyes are on Gaza, we invite You to help us to see Zion with Your eyes. May we be moved for the place Your have desired as Your eternal home. By blessing Zion, by showing up for the people You betrothed so long ago, we agree that anyone from any nation, any faith, any background, can see who You are, Yahweh, the God of Israel, and learn to love You.

This is what the LORD Almighty says: ‘I am very jealous for Zion; I am burning with jealousy for her.’ This is what the LORD says: ‘I will return to Zion and dwell in Jerusalem. Then Jerusalem will be called the Faithful City, and the mountain of the LORD Almighty will be called the Holy Mountain.’… ‘Many peoples and the inhabitants of many cities will yet come, and the inhabitants of one city will go to another and say, “Let us go at once to entreat the LORD and seek the LORD Almighty. I myself am going.”…‘In those days ten people from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, “Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.”’

Zechariah 8

The nations banter on. They plot and spin their stories, crafting evil ways and violent plans to take what You, oh God, have always wanted to give them: peace, blessing, abundance, favor, life, and intimate, never-ending love. Lord, we know controversy of Zion will not end until You arise to settle it. Until then, I pray that the followers of Your son Jesus, Yeshua of Nazareth, find themselves living out the words of Zechariah now, praying for the peace of Jerusalem and hastening the day our Brother, the firstfruits of Your kingdom, is crowned with honor. Every knee will bow and every mouth will confess the glory of the Lion of Judah, the slain Lamb of Zion.

Up Next: The Controversy of Zion, Part 3: God’s Decisive Timeline